Dear President Jonathan:
I want to congratulate you for surviving your checkered tenure as the President of our dear country, Nigeria. Six years are truly arduously long for anyone to steer the ship, which ferries the largest concentration of Black people on planet earth across the nebulous ocean of ethnic jingoism, unscrupulous agitations, melancholic spurting for inclusion or belligerent cry of marginalization, and, most importantly, bellicose vituperation for probity, accountability, and simple sanity in the polity under your executive watch.
I have had to look up all these fancy words in the dictionary to understand what newspapers and other commentators have been saying about you in the last four years that I have been seriously reading all the major newspapers of Nigeria on a daily basis. I am indeed very sorry that you have been so burdened and promise you that freedom is at hand. Soon, in safe Otuoke, you and your wife and cohort in government will burst out the very famous phraseology of Martin Luther King, the late freedom fighter in the United States that: “Free at last… free at last… thank God almighty, we’re free at last.”
I should be a fan of yours, having graduated from a Nigerian university as you and expecting that you would have showcased a measure of patriotic idealism about Nigeria, nurtured on the campuses of our universities, in governing the country and steering her in a direction that would have confirmed a positive yield for her investment in educating you. But from all indications, you have betrayed that expectation and supplanted it with inane maladministration that has retrogressed the country in all ramifications. Well, not for long, dear President Jonathan, for your freedom is at hand. Better still, your humbled citizens will be liberated from you and your ilk.
I am particularly irked by many of your decisions and indecision, which have led me to declare that your Presidency has been a net loss to Nigerians and the continuation of which will further rob the energetic, youthful population of Nigeria of a hopeful future in their beloved country.
Your ostentatious lifestyle has betrayed the humility expected of someone who reported he had no shoes in yester years! This is exemplified in the unprobed, but verified jetgate and armored-car gate of your co-ladies-in-chief. I once read of your desire to acquire the fourth presidential jet and to my chagrin, I found that it was actually the eleventh as reported by many news sources. You are entitled to some luxury as the head of state of a country, but the degree to which you’re reported to have amassed wealth shows bereftness of deep philosophical understanding of the purpose of life and the privilege of leadership. This lack of understanding leads to many failures in the life of a leader of whom much is expected. You are certainly a negative paragon in this regard.
As the Commander-in- Chief of the Nigerian Armed Forces, you failed in your duty of protecting all of our citizens. The Chibok girls were abducted under your watch and you failed to show up to examine the situation until several months after! President Jonathan, this is tantamount to a General deserting his duty and the last time I checked, this is treasonable felony. What you’re guilty of, the same you are accusing some of your soldiers of, though with consequences of death! This is duplicity.
Concerning the Police—you have turned them into mercenaries in their own country, because they are so alienated from the public, that they have confused their loyalty to you as their duty call to the nation. The Police are steeped in an adversarial relationship with the people whose money pays for their service and, who should be protected from corrupt and criminally egocentric leaders like you. Your police do not investigate crimes, even the attempted assassination of a presidential candidate, whose vehicle was riddled with bullets and bomb shrapnel and whose divine purpose was not terminated prematurely. Many of your citizens died at an illegal Immigration recruitment exercise and you remained silent; many have died as a direct result of your inactions in asserting yourself as the leader of this country. Your Police are nothing but a garrison for your protection and the intimidation of Nigerians, especially your perceived enemies. Who do you think you are, Lord Jonathan?
Let me ask you some questions? Did you send Omisore, Obanikoro and, of course, Fayose, with the covering of the Police and the Army, to Ekiti to rig the election there? Did you hear of the recording of their illegal connivance? Well, they have owned up and nothing has been done, even if to give the appearance of justice! Because you did nothing in this regard, ‘am persuaded of your complicity in the matter.
Now, let me address some of what I have come to see as your prevarications. You claimed not to have muted the idea of election postponement, but from all indications, you and your cohort were all behind it after all. Then, there was this idea of an interim government. Well-meaning Nigerians, including Professor Wole Soyinka, asked you if any such illegality was in the offing and you vehemently denied it. But a few days ago, it was reported that you woke up former Vice President Atiku to offer him head of the illegal Interim Government. Mr. President, you must think that you are above the law. You have colluded with Ibrahim Babangida and others to forge a plan to disenfranchise Nigerians and to foist on them a kangaroo government. You are in good company ala June 12. In your desperation, you were reported to have offered the interim Vice Presidency to Bola Tinunbu, first at a Lagos meeting and later at a clandestine meeting at Babangida junior’s house in Abuja. What is it that motivates you, Mr. President?
During your “reign,” you have allowed your appointees to misguide you about every issue of national importance and you have not demonstrated a nationalistic grasp of the nuances of the education sector, the oil industry, and free and fair elections. The education sector is the dearest to me and you failed woefully in many instances, especially by allowing the universities to be closed for an unbearable length of time and for being insensitive to the welfare of the students and their parents. Concerning the oil industry, you have allowed your co-commander in chief, Mrs. Allison-Madueke to set up intermediary paper oil companies to broker Nigerian oil with the established oil companies with whom we have long-standing contracts. Yes, you needed to have reworked and revamped the oil industry to favor the country, but you were sucked into a dubious arrangement that has enriched you and a few who are privy to many seemingly legal, but illicit contraptions of megalomaniacs.
I wish I could draw my letter to a close here, but there are more issues for me to vent on. Chief of this is your recent visits to various leaders across the country, especially the ones in the Southwest. Many news outlets have reported these and the Governor of Lagos, Babatunde Fashola, confirmed that you were parading yourself as the Governor of the American Central Bank by distributing several millions of dollars to gluttonous, ignominious and, albeit, ineffectual leaders with zero political capital to spare. There was this despicable scenario of some Yoruba Obas converging to confer on you their dubious, tacit support for your continuance in office. Do not deceive yourself as they might have deceived you with such ostensible royal endorsement. The endorsement that you garnered from these rulers was at the cost of $250, 000 per head and $1,000,000 for their leader, according to many social media and news outlets. This is certainly money laundering and it is illegal even in “your Nigeria.”
You got this democracy permutation all wrong because the Yoruba are not necessarily beholding to their chiefs and kings. As a matter of fact, some of us are persuaded that the royal institutions should be scrapped. A better strategy would have been town hall meetings with the people of the Southwest to outline your achievements in the region and the entire country during your tenure. That would have earned you a couple of votes in addition to those of the Obas you were reported to have given money and, perhaps, those of their families, tops.
President Jonathan, whose money is it that you have been dolling out all over the country? Did you not confer with your legal advisers of the illegality of bribing people to curry favor and induce the manipulation of votes? Did you realize that this is subversion under the country’s constitution? More importantly, you are corrupting the character of many who would see you as a role model and who would want to emulate this inglorious act? This act also loudly establishes the indecency and debased mentality of the bribe takers who, by all indications, have all swapped their children’s future with a stale pot of porridge. Their act is illegal and they, too, should be prosecuted. Well, by this act I see you as anachronistic, living in 1885ish fiefdom with the mindset that you can buy anyone in order to further your corrupt rulership over them. This has to stop; no, this must stop and that is why I am not going to miss you.
Not even the South South people will miss you when you are no longer Nigeria’s president. Reports reaching me tell of the total neglect of your people and the hopeless condition of the poor, even in Otuoke, who cannot boast of anything you’ve done in the town for public good. However, you have stupendously enriched a few of your cronies that have no desire to be benevolent to anybody. Men often display depravity when they subconsciously become classical conditioned defenders of a lack that they cannot acknowledge consciously. I stand with the poor of Nigeria regardless of where they come from and their cry will soon be answered.
Now I am hearing, again, that you will sack Professor Jega soon. But Mr. President, that would be illegal; but, then, you are the law unto yourself. Your party has also declared, apparently with your tacit support, that you will deploy the military to monitor the elections, even after the courts have declared this an illegal act. Here you go again with your subversion of the country’s constitution, all in the attempt to scuttle the massive movement that is not sympathetic to your cause, and that is bent on effecting change to put an end to your party’s sixteen-year rudderless reign. Nigerians are smarter this time around and they will not be deterred by your scare tactics. The army is not your army but the army of the people and will not yield to an illegal order, especially coming from you, a deserting commander-in–chief.
I have listened with keen interest to the barking of your agent, Femi Fani-Kayode, whose record as the former aviation minister I do not know much about, but the pronouncement credited to him while he fielded questions about the spate of plane crashes during his tenure remain disturbing. He was quoted as saying that “plane crashes occurred at the time because the witches and wizards were blood-thirsty.” Whew! Anything that proceeds from the mouth of this fatalist is easily dismissed because he has no credibility even if he deludes himself of its veracity. That Fani-Kayode is your party’s spokesperson speaks volumes of the house of cards that it is. Now Fani –Kayode is digging into the past of Buhari, but is afraid of his own past, which includes his categorical pronouncement that you, President Jonathan, are “doomed and your political career is moribund because you had betrayed your elder statesman, former President Obasanjo.” That was when he was with the opposition and now he is with you and he’s speaking from the other side of his mouth.
Before I let you go, please listen to the advice from a concerned citizen who does not want any bloodshed of anyone during the election of March 28. Do not turn the army against innocent citizens across the country who will vote their conscience and defend such by staying in the vicinity of the polling booth to defend their votes. Jega is right and you know so, that there is no such law in Nigeria that forbids the peaceful assembly of persons, except if your Inspector General of Police is under instructions to effect a sinister plot that you and your party have contrived. That will not work because the Ekiti shenanigan is a great lesson for all.
If there is any modicum of patriotism left in you, I would advise that your final executive instruction to your ministers and political jobbers, is to plan for the inevitable and to do the honorable thing which is to prepare hand over notes for the in-coming administration and not lay booby traps that would set us back years to untangle, in an effort to move the country out of the quagmire which it has found itself in the hands of those that have been entrusted with all of her resources—mineral, financial, and human.
So long, Mr. President, the end of your captainship is about to be over and we shall not have sleepless nights over you and we shall not cry for you, even though it is not yet Uhuru for our beloved country, Nigeria.
I will write to you, again, after the elections to let you know that I have started to document the misdeeds of the Buhari –Osinbajo administration for full disclosure after they, too, fall out favor with the Nigerian electorate. That’s democracy for you--- the government of the people, for the people, and by the few elected, for a few years.
Bye for now,
Prof. Daniel Olawale Awodiya
Brentwood, New York.
